“One big, fat problem with ideological fanatics, and one give away that someone IS an ideological fanatic, is that they are incapable of distinguishing *criticism* from *persecution*. This is the case with religious as well as non-religious varieties of fanatics.

Any questioning of their ideological master, or the wisdom of their goals, or anything else about their program, isn’t welcomed as an argument to be met, but as an *affront* motivated by sinister motives. It feeds a victim complex, which in turn (like everything else at that point) is made by the fanatic’s mind into just *more* evidence that *he is right* (since ideologies always posit that precisely because they are the absolute truth, the “wicked” will always war against them). . . . .”—Tal Bachman

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“Most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan - they emerged from within it. There was no mass Exodus from Egypt…no violent conquest of Canaan. The early Israelites were - irony of ironies - themselves originally Canaanites!

The conquest of Canaan by Joshua could not have happened [as] described in the Bible. Most of the towns…either weren’t inhabited, didn’t exist or were conquered at wildly different times.” —Finkelstein and Silberman